Pingualuit Crater
Interesting facts
- The only fish living in the crater lake is the Arctic char.
- Its water holds under 3 parts per million of dissolved salts, against roughly 500 ppm in the Great Lakes.
- Second World War pilots used the almost perfectly round crater as a landmark for navigation.
- A US Army Air Forces weather flight over Ungava photographed the raised crater rim on 20 June 1943.
- Diamond prospector Frederick Chubb hoped it was an extinct volcano holding diamonds like South Africa's; geologists suspected an impact instead.
- A 1951 expedition flew in by PBY Catalina flying boat; mine detectors failed because the surrounding granite is rich in magnetite.
- A magnetometer survey found a magnetic anomaly beneath the northern rim, hinting at buried metal-bearing material.
- Iron, nickel, cobalt and chromium enrichment in the melt rock suggests the impactor was a chondritic, stony meteorite.
- Sediment cores taken in 2007 held pollen, algae and insect larvae, with the upper 8.5 m recording two separate interglacial periods.
- Its name changed from Chubb Crater to New Quebec Crater in 1954 and to Pingualuit only in 1999.
Why it is worth it
Pingualuit means roughly "where the land rises" in Inuktitut, and from the air that's exactly what it looks like: a raised rim standing 160 meters above the flat Nunavik tundra around it, ringing a crater more than 400 meters deep and 3.4 kilometers across, punched into the rock by a meteorite strike scientists date to about 1.4 million years ago — one of the older confirmed impact sites in North America.
What fills that bowl is the real draw. A lake roughly 267 meters deep sits inside the crater with no rivers or streams running in or out — it's fed and drained by nothing but rain, snow, and evaporation, which strips out sediment and mineral input almost entirely. The result is water with a salinity below 3 parts per million and visibility reported to depths of 35 meters, making it one of the clearest, purest bodies of fresh water measured anywhere on the planet. Local Inuit have long called it the "Crystal Eye of Nunavik," and the name fits better than most nicknames do.
For most of the twentieth century, outsiders knew it as Chubb Crater and later New Quebec Crater, names attached by prospectors and geologists rather than the people who had always lived near it. It was formally protected as Pingualuit National Park in 2004, under a name that finally matched the Inuit one.
Good to know
The park is functionally reachable only during a short window from mid-June to mid-August, when the tundra thaws enough for camping and travel; outside that, access is effectively closed by weather and terrain.
Getting there
1423 km from Alma. Puvirnituq Airport (YPX) is about 241 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Pingualuit Crater, formerly called the "Chubb Crater" and later the "New Quebec Crater", is a relatively young impact crater located on the Ungava Peninsula in the administrative region of Nord-du-Québec, in Quebec, Canada. It is 3.44 km (2.14 mi) in diameter, and is estimated to be 1.4 ± 0.1 million years old (Pleistocene). The crater and the surrounding area are now part of Pingualuit National Park. The only species of fish in the crater lake is the Arctic char.
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